thoughts on repository/storage/branch/checkout

[Denys Duchier]

Aaron Bentley <aaron.bentley at utoronto.ca> writes:

> I do think it's advisable to be conservative
> in the number of concepts we use, because every concept increases the
> learning curve for new users.

I am not aiming at producing something for consumption by new users. Also keep
in mind that I am not a new user nor new to this forum and that the plethora of
terms being brandished about has nonetheless managed to seriously confuse me,
and _that_ prompted my attempt at trying to uncover a set of primitive notions
less confusing to me and that could be combined in a regular fashion.

> I am stating that "B is local" and "B is dislocated" are variations on
> "the branch is in a specified location", which is the actual fundamental
> concept.  I am also stating that we do not have a concept of
> "inherited".  That is a new concept that you are introducing.
> [...]
> In our proposal, repository branches specify the exact locations of
> their stores via a '.bzr/branch/store-location' or something.

That seems to contradict the understanding that I thought I had gotten from
lifeless on IRC.  If you specify the store location explicitly then you can't
easily move a repo, unless said location is required to be specified relatively
in which case that stipulation amounts to my notion of inheritance.

>> re: confusion: I don't think so: you perform these operations in (and on) the
>> checkout, not in the workdir.
>
> These appear to be operations on files, not on checkout-relative paths.
>  I hold that it *would* be confusing to do 'bzr add foo' when foo does
> not exist in the cwd.

I guess we'll just have to disagree on that point.

> I do not think adding a concept to support your infrequent use is a good
> tradeoff for a system that wants to be easy to learn.

I am not adding a concept, I am merely making it possible to freely and
uniformely combine 4 primitive concepts, each one very circumscribed and thus
hopefully easy to grasp.  I think that trying to give names to all these
possible combinations would be confusing - in fact the current overabundance of
names _is_ confusing.

Cheers,

--Denys